a disobedient gathering: poems for plants who can’t stay put by Katherine Barrett
The poems have a casual swagger and impish play with their subjects.
The poems have a casual swagger and impish play with their subjects.
This was originally published on our Patreon in October 2024. We’re re-sharing it here to kick off Mental Health Awareness Month, May 2025.
Her latest collection of poems taps into the strange beauty of the unexpected, the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional. Burdick also dances with absurdism, not-so-gently mocking our earnest search for meaning and using dark humour to comment on the human condition.
Harris takes the bleakness of her landscape and makes it beautiful.
Featuring Natalie Lim, Kyle Flemmer, Steven Mayoff, and Alexey Soshalskiy
Blood Root investigates the poet’s spiritual connection with home, and the importance of reparations and reconciliation as a settler descended from mostly Dutch heritage.
It’s lovely to read a collection and not once be pestered by the question, why is this a poem? Like her previous poems are not facile or conversational narratives. They are dense and intense.
This conversation took place on December 29th, 2024. It has been lightly edited for clarity and to the interviewee’s satisfaction.
These poems offer humour, irony, despair, anger, joy, persistence, and strength for the journey.
[Burdick] concludes with admission of ephemerality of both grief and grace, “Our bodies take everything in, then dispose/ of the everything, gradually.”
In 2024, Bren Simmers and Robert Colman both published books of poems centred on familial loss, with both tackling, in part, a parent’s struggle with dementia. Beyond very similar titles—The Work (Simmers) and Ghost Work (Colman)—both poets brought to the topic a fascination with the power of form. The authors recently had a virtual discussion about the process involved in their books’ creation.
From what I’ve seen his form of poetry makes use of the whole page, not as in scattered individual words but as metrical spacing of phrases.
Dog and Moon is a slow read, not because it is hard so much as it is rich and rewarding, so satisfies early and often.